Minecraft, Yourcraft, Ourcraft—building is more fun with your buddies.

Minecraft is a sandbox-type game where you gather materials and use them to create things, which is about as understated a description as "the sun is a big bright light in the sky." The poster child for indie gaming success, Minecraft began as a basement coding project by hat-wearing Swede Markus Persson in 2010; it has since become a bona fide phenomenon.

In Minecraft, you play a mute protagonist in an unending retro-blocky landscape populated by lots and lots of NPCs, with no traditional adventure game-type goal other than survival. This seems easy at first. When the game begins, you invariably find yourself on a sandy beach somewhere, and a bit of experimentation quickly yields the knowledge that you can affect your environment by punching things. You can punch trees to break them apart and collect wood, for instance, which you can use to make tools, which you can use to gather more materials, which you can use to make more things. You'll just be getting the hang of the basic mechanics when night falls—and the zombies and skeletons and spiders and creepers come out to collect your soul.

As the game grew more popular, Persson (known to fans by his in-game handle "Notch") hired staff and eventually turned over daily programming duties to other folks. These days, Notch spends his days developing other games and being interviewed by famous Internet journalists, while Minecraft thrives on multiple platforms including PC, Mac, Linux, and XBox 360.

The game has an engrossing single-player component, with a core gameplay mechanism that feels like a LEGO block set—go build stuff!—but it's much more fun to make things with your friends than to labor alone. Public Minecraft servers are widely available (here's a good list), but they have an unfortunate dark side: as with any public online game, keeping out folks bent on making mischief is ultimately impossible. If you want to play Minecraft with just your friends, the easiest way to do so is to run your own server.

Your first choice, should you go this route, is whether you want to use a managed hosting provider, use a regular non-Minecraft host, or just run the server yourself. Each option has tradeoffs. Choosing to use a fully managed Minecraft host like Servercraft or BeastNode means that you'll be up and hosting within minutes of forking over your credit card number, but you may have less control.

A non-Minecraft Web host, like a virtual private server from A Small Orange, might cost more, but it gives you additional flexibility in configuration (what if you want to add mods or tweak things later, or install additional server software?).

Finally, hosting the code yourself on a dedicated server in your closet is the most complex option, but can also be the cheapest and most flexible, assuming you have spare hardware lying around. For smaller Minecraft instances where you expect to only have a couple of players—for example, if you just want to play Minecraft with your kids—you can even run the server on your main computer without needing a separate piece of hardware.

In this guide, bits of which have appeared on my personal blog over the last few months, we will walk through some fairly generic instructions which should apply to both a VPS and self-hosting. After that, we'll move on to more advanced options that you can implement to spice up your Minecraft hosting experience. We're going to burn more words talking about how to make this all work with Linux than with other operating systems, since Linux is the most common option for hosting; if you're using a VPS, you'll almost certainly be using Linux, and if you're hosting out of your home, that's probably what you should use as well. However, don't feel left out if you want to get a Minecraft server running on Windows or OS X—we'll include you, too!

One quick note: this guide assumes that you're interested in running a Minecraft server because you're already a Minecraft player. We're not going to spend any time explaining how to actually download and set up the Minecraft client, nor will we talk about Minecraft basics like gameplay or strategy. This guide is long enough as it is!

Quick start

The Minecraft server binaries can be downloaded from the same page as the full game. The server package is free and available as either a Windows executable or a Java .jar file for Linux and OS X (and for Windows, too, if you don't want the executable version). Grab whichever one you need.

Windows users have it easiest: simply download the executable and run it. If you don't have a Java runtime environment installed, the executable will direct you to a download page where you can get it; once installed, re-run the Minecraft server binary. This gets you a Minecraft server up and available on TCP port 25565. Connect to it with your Minecraft client and explore your shiny new world.

To run Minecraft on OS X and Linux, you'll also need a Java runtime environment installed. For OS X, you can quickly install the latest Apple-approved version of Java by opening a Terminal window (click the Spotlight icon, type "terminal") and executing the command "java". If you don't already have Java installed, OS X will automatically grab it for you.

On a Debian-derived flavor of Linux like Ubuntu or Mint, the OpenJDK Java project is available from the default repositories and can be installed with a quick sudo aptitude install openjdk-7-jre (yes, we're using aptitude instead of apt-get, and so should you! Aptitude is available by default in Ubuntu server, but you might have to install it via apt-get for the desktop version). If you feel like you need the actual, genuine, Oracle-produced Java runtime environment instead of OpenJDK, you need to follow a few more steps.

That's it—just like your PC brethren, you're up and running with a Minecraft world available on port 25565.

The first time you start your Minecraft server, it checks for any existing Minecraft world and configuration files. If it doesn't find any, it creates everything it needs. In a fresh install, you'll end up with a world directory containing the newly generated Minecraft map, some configuration files, and a log file. If you plan on running Minecraft under a dedicated Minecraft user account, like on a real server, you might want to pre-create that account before firing up the server, though it's not strictly necessary to do so. (We'll cover how to move the Minecraft directory shortly.)

81 Reader Comments

The really cool thing about Minecraft is that Notch is pretty open to modding and really wants to make a tool to allow other people to create amazing things, which is why I think that people keep coming back to the game, even after taking some time off because they aren't feeling creative.

This wasn't always the case. There was a period of time when Notch was actively hostile to modders, and he remarked more than once on his twitter account that he felt modding violated his copyright on the game and needed to be stopped at all costs. He spouted off a bunch of wrongheaded nonsense about how it was his game and modding was wrong and damaging.

Fortunately, the player community changed his mind and he slowly came around; these days, Mojang is actively working with the community on the API, which should be showing up in a release at some point in the future.

The really cool thing about Minecraft is that Notch is pretty open to modding and really wants to make a tool to allow other people to create amazing things, which is why I think that people keep coming back to the game, even after taking some time off because they aren't feeling creative.

This wasn't always the case. There was a period of time when Notch was actively hostile to modders, and he remarked more than once on his twitter account that he felt modding violated his copyright on the game and needed to be stopped at all costs. He spouted off a bunch of wrongheaded nonsense about how it was his game and modding was wrong and damaging.

Fortunately, the player community changed his mind and he slowly came around; these days, Mojang is actively working with the community on the API, which should be showing up in a release at some point in the future.

Hell the guy use to randomize the file names with each update to make modding more difficult. Thankfully he no longer dips his fingers in the Minecraft pool and leaves most of it with Jens, who helped encourage the inclusion of modders directly into employees of Mojang.Shoo.

This wasn't always the case. There was a period of time when Notch was actively hostile to modders, and he remarked more than once on his twitter account that he felt modding violated his copyright on the game and needed to be stopped at all costs. He spouted off a bunch of wrongheaded nonsense about how it was his game and modding was wrong and damaging.

I'm glad the community finally was able to do that, but I do understand his initial perspective on modding. I would also be annoyed at first if someone took something I poured a ton of effort into and started to mess around with it in a way that I didn't really like.

That being said, the most important thing (from my perspective) is that he listened to his userbase and realized that they were making a reasonable argument, even if he didn't necessarily see eye-to-eye with them at first. Not only that, but they're trying to actively encourage it now, and given how popular and seemingly long-lasting Minecraft is I think that period where they were hostile to modders is going to end up being a relatively small blip in the lifecycle of the game.

I can not for the life of me figure out what it is about this game. I go on youtube start watching videos next thing I know its 4 in the morning. Maybe one of these days I'll get around to playing it haha

The difficulty I've encountered with hosting a MineCraft server under OS X isn't MineCraft or OS X but rather Java. The hardware is an old PowerMac G5 with four 2.5 Ghz PPC 970's cores and 12 GB of RAM. Due to the inherent 32 bit nature of Apple's Java implementation in 10.5, I can't allocate more than 2 GB to the MineCraft server. The JVM can consume more than 2 GB from what I've seen under top but not the individual application.

I've also tried bukkit but ran into issues regarding Java versions. Not only are PowerMac's limited to 32 bit Java but also to J2SE 5.0. bukkit will run under this version but the majority of plug-ins require J2SE 6.0 or 7.0 to function. I was able to locate the source and instructions on how to build OpenJDK 7 for OS X 32 bit PowerPC. The catch I encountered is that the repository for OpenJDK didn't have the code for the specific port (which was technically BSD).

I have considered switching over to a Linux distribution that'd run on PowerPC but there are a few OS X only things this box still runs for my home network.

So while I have still have my server running, it isn't what I'd want it to be even given decent hardware to run on.

"As a general rule of thumb, start with 1GB and consider allocating another half a gigabyte per regular player."

200 player server would take 101GB!

One thing Hutchinson forget is you need fast disks for whatever is hosting the file store for the world.

Minecraft writes all region files synchronously, which means no matter how fast the CPU is, or how much ram, the entire game world hangs while writing out a region. This becomes a problem when the region change list starts growing due to players or actions which kick regions into the changed list.

For my personal server, I had to host it off a ram disk to get acceptable performance simply due to how Minecraft treats it's save files. And it used to be worse with the chunk format.

One thing Hutchinson forget is you need fast disks for whatever is hosting the file store for the world.

This is a really good point. Things are definitely a lot better than they used to be, with Minecraft maps being made up of hundreds of thousands of individual chunk files; the Anvil format introduced last year is a huge help in reducing overall disk activity.

But, yes, fast disks help a lot. I've been running my server on SSD since the beginning, which has helped tremendously. I'm not so sure that a ramdisk is necessary if you have an SSD you can use; memory allocated to the ramdisk is memory that you can't allocate to Minecraft, and Minecraft is going to cache map data in RAM whether you want it to or not. With a ramdisk, you're potentially storing stuff in memory twice.

My opinion, based on personal experience, is that an SSD is far more practical than a ramdisk.

Anywho, I also wanted to mention the Tekkit server you can find over in the GESC forums. It's whitelisted, so you need a little vouching if you are new, but the people are quite friendly and there is a wildly inappropriate number of mad scientists building stuff! I joined a few weeks/months ago, and my wife can tell you it's addictive.

For those unaware, Tekkit (I think it's the multiplayer part of the Technic Mod Pack) is full of mods that expand redstone into true wiring, adds myriad pipes, machines, crafting possibilities, nuclear reactors, more rail, expanded crops, high-voltage and other energy apparatus, and alchemy! The possibilities making constructing your fantasies both easier, more complicated, and very rewarding.

If Minecraft is basic Leggos, Technic/Tekkit is like the Technic and Computer controlled bits added in, and even more complex.

Has anyone had success running a server on Nas4Free/FreeNas (based on FreeBSD)? I just setup a Nas4Free box on an old computer that is a touch overpowered for simply fileserving, so it could do some work here...

I am moderately comfortable getting things setup on a typical graphical linux desktop, but this is headless, and FreeBSD. I can attach a monitor and get full terminal access though, or SSH in, but I'd have to learn that first ;- )

You know, I have been running Minecraft on Azure for the past two months or so, it works like a dream, and potentially, the "pay per hour" model has HUGE potential. I'll just get me and my buddies to pitch in, and give everyone control over the azure instance.

Just turn the instance on when you want to play, and turn it off when you are done

Hey, that's cool! I will try that on my Azure account this very evening.

One thing Hutchinson forget is you need fast disks for whatever is hosting the file store for the world.

Minecraft writes all region files synchronously, which means no matter how fast the CPU is, or how much ram, the entire game world hangs while writing out a region. This becomes a problem when the region change list starts growing due to players or actions which kick regions into the changed list.

For my personal server, I had to host it off a ram disk to get acceptable performance simply due to how Minecraft treats it's save files. And it used to be worse with the chunk format.

"As a general rule of thumb, start with 1GB and consider allocating another half a gigabyte per regular player."

200 player server would take 101GB!

One thing Hutchinson forget is you need fast disks for whatever is hosting the file store for the world.

Minecraft writes all region files synchronously, which means no matter how fast the CPU is, or how much ram, the entire game world hangs while writing out a region. This becomes a problem when the region change list starts growing due to players or actions which kick regions into the changed list.

For my personal server, I had to host it off a ram disk to get acceptable performance simply due to how Minecraft treats it's save files. And it used to be worse with the chunk format.

Texture packs are definitely a big deal for some folks, and they can change the game experience profoundly. I prefer the default textures--the retro pixelation appeals to me--but I know a lot of people feel like you do, Dracorat, and they want to see something shinier.

In addition to the texture packs, theres also mods out there that can just make the game look cooler. The most amazing would have to be the GLSL Shaders, which can pretty much make the game look like anything you want.

Honestly I had totally forgotten about the shaders mod until now. I'm going to have to play around with it again and find a nice texture pack to go with it.

Minecraft is a great game in many ways. It is quite a remarkable achievement in terms of Java based game growing to such massive proportions (although not without some memory issues throughout). The really interesting thing to me was an article I found about 2 years ago now, which told of a middle school or high school teacher who used the game to teach the fundamentals of concepts in computer science to younger kids; it allowed them to build their own logic gates in the game and visualize how they worked and interacted in a more hands-on approach than the traditional textbook/lecture method. Vech's Race for Wool custom built maps have shown that the game can pan out and incorporate multiplayer, competitive, goal-based gameplay elements and teamwork into it which, for a lot of people, helps give a purpose to the game. (A lot of people I have shown the game to have played it for a bit and then gone "yeah its cool... but what's the point?" although that was early on during the Alpha and Beta phases of the game).

As far as the modding goes - I am glad Notch got some sense and embraced it early on. Not that I think he could have done anything to really stop it once it started anyway (reverse engineering the code is, or at least was, rather simple). This is a case that clearly shows that the community has given their share of input and provided so much support and new concepts to the game, and many of those have been incorporated into the official builds as it has progressed. Without doing so, there would likely be a lot of elements which players have come to love missing from the game. Just compare it to the xbox version and laugh. (yes I recognize that there are a great many differences in the two versions, but the PC version is clearly much more fun and advanced).

CraftBukkit is a self-contained Minecraft server replacement which is built from the Bukkit API. The Bukkit project grew out of an earlier Minecraft mod project called hmod (which is no longer online, as it has been entirely superseded by Bukkit). It's not the only way to mod Minecraft (see, for example, Tekkit…

CraftBukkit plugins as mentioned here are amazing, there is a huge thriving community on BukkitDev, for about every kind of plugin you can imagine. The Bukkit API they are written for is fairly stable, often old plugins work with newer versions of Minecraft unmodified, or with only minor tweaks. Bukkit has been by far the most successful Minecraft modding API yet.

However it is fundamentally limited – Bukkit plugins themselves are strictly server-side, which restricts their ability to enhance the game. Server-only plugins can do surprisingly much, but by themselves they cannot implement even simple features like adding a new block or item, which requires client-side modification. There are several solutions to this problem of client/server modding with various tradeoffs, but the best in my opinion is the the Forge/CraftBukkit server from MC Port Central. MCPC's server allows you to run server-side Bukkit plugins and client/server ported Forge mods – the best of both worlds.

To give you an idea of what is possible with this setup, here are the mods I was using on a Forge/CraftBukkit server recently:

These mods basically make Minecraft a whole new game, a brand new experience. And you can run them alongside all your favorite Bukkit plugins.

There are some downsides to running a "modded" server as its sometimes known (as opposed to a "vanilla" Bukkit server). Of course, everyone who connects to your server has to have all of the same mods installed themselves, with the same configuration. This isn't that much of a problem as it may seem, especially if your server is only among a small group of friends, but it can be tricky to configure client and server identically in some cases. Secondly the mods tend to update much slower than Minecraft, so while "vanilla" servers (with or without plugins) may have already updated to the latest release by now, most mods of the best mods at this time of writing are still on Minecraft 1.2.5. It all comes down to personal choice – for me, I much prefer a highly-modded but older Minecraft than the latest official release sans mods.

Getting all these mods to play together can be a challenge, which led to "modpacks" such as Tekkit and Feed the Beast. These modpacks include various mods already configured to work together, making for easy setup.

However, using a modpack obviously limits the mods you're using. I liken modpacks to pre-built pre-configured PCs you can buy, someone else already took the time to assemble and integrate. Tekkit is, perhaps, a Dell. For the enthusiast, building your own PC from parts is often a better option – similarly, if you're really into Minecraft, it is well worth it to select and install the mods on your server yourself. Tekkit actually just uses the Forge/CraftBukkit server prepackaged with ported Forge mods from MC Port Central (including a a few I ported), but you can go straight to the source and put together all of your favorite mods yourself, just like building a PC from carefully-selected high-quality parts you ordered off Newegg.

Many of the mods I used are not available in any modpack. If you want to see what Minecraft servers people have built with MCPC, I highly recommend checking out the MCPC server forum.

There are guides and explanations and server lists. Whitelisting is required on all Ars-run servers, and preferably someone to vouch for you. Then if you turn out to be a dick, your friend gets banned as well as you. :-)

Without any credentials, you can look at the map for Golgar's Tekkit world here:

[be sure to check out the right-hand-side pop-out menu, you can look at a top down representation, a 'false 3d' isometric view, or a 'cave mode' view. All can be quite interesting. Currently Golgar's map is about 4,000 blocks wide east-west and ~10,000 blocks tall north-south. Traveling by foot takes about 15 minutes per 1,000 blocks.)

So you can still play in a crippled way, where you're scared of monsters, constantly breaking your stone/iron pickaxes, have to walk everywhere, have to keep an eye on food, and always, always have to mine for resources.

Or you can have an enjoyable time, contemplating the landscape, and wondering what kind of Large Blot you can establish.

The 'race' to get high powered tools is just a means to an end -- the banishment of drudgery. Tekkit tech-research-and-development is entirely something you -can- do, and not something you -must- do.

There are some people who love the 'challenge' of raw minecraft, and if that's what 'floats their boat' that's great. As long as they don't insist that -everyone else- has to be in the same boat!

There is the argument:

"why play on a multiplayer server with 'arbitrary' restrictions, when you can play on your own 'private' world and do whatever you like?"

I think we all know, in our heart of hearts, that the reasons we play multiplayer is to show-off our creations to others, interact in order to pull order out of the chaos.

The Tekkit world is a vibrant and interesting place. Resources aren't rare, nobody cares if you walk off with a full stack of diamonds or redmatter or whatever, it's not difficult to replace most raw materials.

The standard minecraft world can also vibrant and interesting, but also vastly more effort-intensive.

It's as though we were comparing full on over the top RPGs like Lineage, to casual happy fun time City of Heroes; they're similar games in that they run on a computer, but the amount of effort required to play one game is exponentially more time intensive than the requirements for the other.

For a lot of people that 'artificial' barrier between ability to do whatever, and 'I barely have enough bread to survive two days', is the difference between a game and a god-damned -job-.

Just quickly, it could be a good idea to have new Linux users take a look atscreen -r - it reconnects you to a running screen instance. So, you can run screen -r $minecraft-screen, then type in server commands normally as if the server was running directly on your terminal, instead of worrying about silly things two levels of escape codes through screen and su.

One thing Hutchinson forget is you need fast disks for whatever is hosting the file store for the world.

Minecraft writes all region files synchronously, which means no matter how fast the CPU is, or how much ram, the entire game world hangs while writing out a region. This becomes a problem when the region change list starts growing due to players or actions which kick regions into the changed list.

For my personal server, I had to host it off a ram disk to get acceptable performance simply due to how Minecraft treats it's save files. And it used to be worse with the chunk format.

I'll toss in a recommendation for Daddy Cheese hosting out of the UK. The name is goofy, but they offer US and EU hosted Minecraft options.

They utilize Multicraft to administer your server via the web, and gave you FTP access to upload your world, texture packs, mods, etc. They'll even help you install mods if you're having issues.

I run a 12 person creative server for about $7/month.

The only downside to their service is their billing system. While it works fine, it doesn't support automatic payments so I have a monthly calendar reminder to login and pay it with PayPal. It's not a huge hassle though, and the server runs nicely

I'll toss in a recommendation for Daddy Cheese hosting out of the UK. The name is goofy, but they offer US and EU hosted Minecraft options.

They utilize Multicraft to administer your server via the web, and gave you FTP access to upload your world, texture packs, mods, etc. They'll even help you install mods if you're having issues.

I run a 12 person creative server for about $7/month.

The only downside to their service is their billing system. While it works fine, it doesn't support automatic payments so I have a monthly calendar reminder to login and pay it with PayPal. It's not a huge hassle though, and the server runs nicely

- CG

I've just set up a Daddy Cheese hosting account for their 1GB server to run Tekkit. So far, so good

I'll toss in a recommendation for Daddy Cheese hosting out of the UK. The name is goofy, but they offer US and EU hosted Minecraft options.

They utilize Multicraft to administer your server via the web, and gave you FTP access to upload your world, texture packs, mods, etc. They'll even help you install mods if you're having issues.

I run a 12 person creative server for about $7/month.

The only downside to their service is their billing system. While it works fine, it doesn't support automatic payments so I have a monthly calendar reminder to login and pay it with PayPal. It's not a huge hassle though, and the server runs nicely

- CG

I've just set up a Daddy Cheese hosting account for their 1GB server to run Tekkit. So far, so good

Seriously considering setting one up as well. Their hosting offering seem pretty attracting (unless the GBP exchange rate suddenly gets a lot worse). One question, how do you handle scheduled backups or manual rollback? That's the only thing I can't find on Multicraft's website.

I'd love to get some of that backup loving into it, and probably needs an update to use the latest Java, then you wouldn't need to do all this manual stuff to fire up a server on EC2. And if you just happen to have an OpenStack cloud at work you need to uh ... benchmark.

So you can make a server, but how do you get the client to connect to it? And where do you get the client from? I saw on the page a Minecraft.exe but all it does is need a username and password, there's nowhere for it to specify a server address.

So you can make a server, but how do you get the client to connect to it? And where do you get the client from? I saw on the page a Minecraft.exe but all it does is need a username and password, there's nowhere for it to specify a server address.

That's why I put the caveat at the beginning of the article where I said that we were going to assume you already owned and played Minecraft

You get the client at www.minecraft.net, and it's not free. You need to buy a copy, and as part of that process you'll get a Minecraft user name and password. Then when you start up the client, you put in your user name and password and you're authenticated against Mojang's servers. After that, you can play the single player game or join a multiplayer server.

Hey ever herd of BUKKIT??? this is amazing but all of the server that you play on that have moe than your friends (no offence) will be running bukkit, its much mor affect and you can run may more things on it like PLUINS and this is also how a Tekkit server runs, bukkit with tuns of plugins!!!

I'll toss in a recommendation for Daddy Cheese hosting out of the UK. The name is goofy, but they offer US and EU hosted Minecraft options.

They utilize Multicraft to administer your server via the web, and gave you FTP access to upload your world, texture packs, mods, etc. They'll even help you install mods if you're having issues.

I run a 12 person creative server for about $7/month.

The only downside to their service is their billing system. While it works fine, it doesn't support automatic payments so I have a monthly calendar reminder to login and pay it with PayPal. It's not a huge hassle though, and the server runs nicely

- CG

I've just set up a Daddy Cheese hosting account for their 1GB server to run Tekkit. So far, so good

Seriously considering setting one up as well. Their hosting offering seem pretty attracting (unless the GBP exchange rate suddenly gets a lot worse). One question, how do you handle scheduled backups or manual rollback? That's the only thing I can't find on Multicraft's website.

I'm not actually sure. You can set up a task within Multicraft to backup, there's also a manual function that saves a ZIP file back to the FTP root, and you can restore from that, but I haven't done any of these things so not sure how smoothly they work.

My boys play Minecraft all the time, and I'd love to run a server for them; it's pretty annoying what a resource hog it is. The only "spare" machine I have that could run the server is the one they're actually using to play, and that wouldn't be a popular solution. Thanks for the guide though, maybe I'll recycle some hardware in the future.

I have an old netbook that I've dedicated to be the minecraft server. It won't host 25 players, but it only needs to handle 2 right now and it's the only computer I'm willing to leave on 24/7 (23 watts measured).

I still need to update my network (100Mb/s) and a few other things, but it seems to be working OK as is.

I installed MineOS (based on Crux Linux) and everything works except Bukkit. My guess is that CraftBukkit requires 64-bit and my atom N270 just does not do 64 bit. But I'm not really sure.

I liked this article, and since my two sons are avid Minecraft players I thought I'd give it a shot. But I've had nothing but trouble trying to get it running.

I downloaded the OS X version of the server, configured it, and set it up to run with 2GB ram. I'm just using the standard config with the default IP and port.

Neither my iphone nor the kids' kindle can connect to the server, or even see it. When we run minecraft on our own devices we can see the other's servers, but we can't see the headless server that I'm running.

All the machines are on the same wireless LAN. I read through a couple pages of the minecraft forums but didn't see anything. I'm running Java 1.6 and server 1.3.2. Any ideas?

Neither my iphone nor the kids' kindle can connect to the server, or even see it. When we run minecraft on our own devices we can see the other's servers, but we can't see the headless server that I'm running.

It sounds like you're using Minecraft Pocket Edition. That's a separate product and cannot connect to the server version of Minecraft, which works only with the full desktop version of Minecraft. However, I believe you can play with other pocket edition players on the same LAN without the need for a standalone server, so you're not entirely out of luck.

It sounds like you're using Minecraft Pocket Edition. That's a separate product and cannot connect to the server version of Minecraft, which works only with the full desktop version of Minecraft.

Yes, shortly before breaking out wireshark and snooping the traffic, that's what I came to realize. It's unfortunate that the pocket edition can't connect to the big brother server. I don't know what the limitations are, but if they could connect it would open up a whole new set of devices that would be able to play. The kids and their cousins all have iPods, iPhones, Kindles, etc., but not desktops or laptops. I was hoping to set up a server that they could all connect to and play on.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.